


Hope

by rathernotmyname



Series: Fictober! 2020 [7]
Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bazil the Bunny, Continuation of "Silence", Fictober! Day 7, Fluff and Angst, Gay but Nobody Cares, M/M, Maelys the Bunny, Rabbits, they are unstoppable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27993441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rathernotmyname/pseuds/rathernotmyname
Summary: Eugene receives mail, Snafu hopes for more than a punch to the face, and local bunnies Maelys and Bazil need to share more than usual.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton & Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Series: Fictober! 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050200
Kudos: 3





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note:  
> I DO NOT CONSENT TO MY WORK BEING HOSTED OR REPOSTED ON ANY UNOFFICIAL APPS OR WEBSITES OTHER THAN ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN WITHOUT MY APPROVAL, PARTICULARLY APPS WITH AD REVENUE AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES.

Eugene was occupied with staring miserably into his ice tea cup when the mail arrived. 

His mother called his name, not answering when he loudly asked what she wanted. Huffing, he stood up from where he was sitting against a tree and went back inside.

“Eugene, darling, there’s an envelope for you on the kitchen table. Be a dear and help your father look for his files, will you?”

“Yes,” Eugene grumbled, sighing internally about his father’s worsening memory when it came to leaving his things lying around somewhere they definitely didn’t belong.

He passed the kitchen table on his way to the hallway, glancing at the mentioned envelope. 

Strange. The name of the shipper was missing. 

After finding the missing patient files on the guest restrooms’ counter, of all places, he took the envelope and retreated to his room.

He turned the folded paper in his hands. It was dirty and greasy, either courtesy of the mailman or of the sender. Probably the latter, since the mailman was the cleanest person Eugene had ever met, and that meant a lot in the area he grew up in.

He opened the envelope. A few strands of straw were the first things that fell out, a slightly less dirty piece of paper followed. 

For no reason at all, Eugene’s heart began to race in his chest. He refrained from looking at the signature at the bottom of the page, eyes sliding across the greeting line.

‘Dear Eugene’ had been written three times and crossed out again, the third time because the pen that the sender wrote with had obviously ran out of ink.

A ‘Dear Mr. Sledge’ was written below it, crossed out so viciously that the paper felt dangerously thin on that spot. 

As if the sender had given up on the formalities, below it was just a short, scrawled, almost unreadable ‘Sledgehammer’.

Eugene was sure that he had been struck by lightning. However it had reached him through two levels of brick house. Nothing else could explain his violent flinch, the goosebumps on his arms, and almost comical double take his brain had to perform.

Almost as if in a trance, he continued reading.

‘Sledgehammer,

I’m sure you hate my guts, can’t blame you. In case you want to come over and punch me in the face for what I did, here’s my address:’

Eugene wheezed, a noise that sounded as if it had been punched out of his chest. His eyes flitted over said address again and again, unbelieving in what was written there, smudged black on greasy white. 

‘If you do come over to deck me, do it quickly, because I might move, you never know. Also, in case you come and I’m still at work or dead because of some freak accident, please watch your feet. And bring salad.’

Snafu had signed with ‘M. Shelton’, but Eugene didn’t even read that part. He frantically turned the page, searching for a postscript, but all he found were a few weirdly formed tears. They looked like someone had tried to take a bite out of the letter. Huh.

Eugene stood up, took his travel bag down from where it waited on his closet and started packing, methodically, using the space as efficiently as possible. Then he walked to the bathroom, packed his shaving kit and his toothbrush, bid his parents good-bye, and got into his car before they could utter more than a word in protest. 

He thanked the God he didn’t believe in anymore that he had bought the car. His exit would have been only half as dramatic if he’d have to ask his father to drive him to the train station.

To be truthful, it was a ridiculous undertake he had agreed to, and yet there he stood, on Merriell Shelton’s porch with a bag of arugula salad in his hand.

Instead of knocking, he watched the street musicians in front of a ramshackle wooden house on the other side of the narrow street. An old lady leaned out of the window, black skin shining in the afternoon sun and white teeth gleaming in her smiling mouth. 

He was aware that he was dragging out the inevitable, but he stood there for a few more minutes like a moron until the neighbors’ kids started to stare at him curiously through their fences and windows.

Eugene blew out a deep breath. Well then. 

He knocked.

For a while, nothing happened, then he heard shuffling and someone speaking on the other side. The closer the person walked to the door, the better Eugene could understand what he was saying.

“Maelys, if ya dare to eat that goddamn magazine, you’re not getting a bedtime story tonight.”

Someone stomped their foot.

“No, I’m not arguing with you. Bazil, I fucking swear to God--”

Eugene felt as if someone had dropped a stone into his stomach. Kids? Snafu had kids? Was he supposed to watch his feet because of feral toddlers or because of safety hazards in the form of toys on the floor?

He swallowed and was tempted to jump off the porch into the next bush, but then he remembered that he was supposed to be angry as hell at Snafu. 

Damn. He couldn’t very well clobber him or curse him out in front of his kids, could he?

Before he could break down in despair, the door was ripped open. 

Eugene stared at the apparition before him, and the apparition named Snafu stared back. 

There was straw on his bare feet, and his pants were full of white hair. He didn’t wear a shirt, but Eugene hadn’t expected him to. Maybe he worked at a farm and helped with the horses?

“You motherfucker,” he said to Snafu, because he couldn’t hold himself back, and realistically, Snafu would have some more years until his kids asked what the word meant, if they didn’t know it already anyway. He didn’t trust Snafu to tame his dirty mouth in their presence. 

Speaking of – he reared his head, but he couldn’t see any kids in the vicinity. Maybe they had hidden underneath the bed. Or maybe Snafu had gone insane and he was all alone, after all? The thought made Eugene so helplessly sad that it annoyed him. It served Snafu right. 

“Yeah,” Snafu replied easily, and then they were kissing on the front porch, out in the open, completely unprotected from the curious looks of the neighborhood children and the lady and her musicians. 

(Eugene expected anything. Appalled screams, bottles and vegetables being thrown at them, kids siccing their dogs on them. What he didn’t expect was the musicians stopping short and beginning to play a love song he had heard on the radio a few times, the old lady singing along delightedly with her rough, melodic voice.) 

Snafu noticed his confused look and led him inside, closing the door behind him. 

“They’ve seen everything ‘round here,” he explained. “Ain’t nothing gonna shock them anymore.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Eugene answered weakly and gratefully accepted the glass of water Snafu shoved into his hand unceremoniously. 

After a few sips, he felt a little less overwhelmed and remembered the reason he was here. He didn’t really feel like punching that beautiful mouth he had just kissed anymore, but something had to be done against the bottomless anger brewing inside him, made sharp with desperation and simultaneously soft with relief. 

“You left,” he said, voice small. 

Snafu pulled his shoulders up and turned his head away.

“I woke up, and you weren’t there,” Eugene said, getting louder with every syllable. “I woke up, and your seat was empty and I was completely alone for sixteen months until today.” 

Snafu turns around, corners of his mouth pulling downwards, eyes big and shiny with unshed tears.

“But you weren’t,” he argued, pacing nervous little circles around his kitchen table. “You had your parents, and- and your brother, and your best friend, and your fucking mansion on the hills!”

When he turned back around to face Eugene, his face was flushed and his cheeks wet. 

“You had everything you could wish for, everything I could never give you, every fucking thing laid in your lap like it was nothing, probably some servants to… to fucking wipe your ass--” 

Snafu broke down into wracked sobs, wiping at his eyes furiously and coming to a halt next to a wooden box laying on the ground, feet buried in the straw that’s lying around there. 

Eugene could feel tears of his own rolling down his cheeks, dropping down and wetting his collar. 

“Now, that’s an exaggeration,” he said, trying to sort through Snafu’s flood of words.

As soon as he had, he stood, taking Snafu’s hands to turn to him. He wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“You left because you thought you couldn’t make me happy in the long run?” he asked, searching eye contact. 

“Didn’t think, I knew,” Snafu muttered, freeing one hand from Eugene’s grip to wipe at his nose. He looked truly pitiful.

“Merriell.” Eugene let go of his other hand and took Snafu’s face between his palms. 

“I have never been so relieved to leave home, knowing that I would meet you again. There’s nothing, no, you listen to me, nothing in the whole wide fucking world of our lord and savior Jesus Christ that would satisfy me more or make me happier than getting to be with you.”

His answer was a new surge of tears. 

Snafu clung to him, sobbing into his shoulder, and Eugene decided he had enough of holding back sixteen months of heartbreak and joined him, crying all of his loneliness into Snafu’s bare, brown skin. 

After some 20 minutes, they both calmed down and relocated to the small couch at the other end of the one-room apartment. 

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Snafu sniffled, smiling despite himself, “I’m not good with words, boy. I can’t ever make that speech up to you.”

“I gathered as much from your letter,” Eugene replied dryly, wiping a wayward tear from Snafu’s chin. 

Snafu snorted.

“By the way…” Eugene suddenly remembered the (perhaps non-existential) children. “Snaf, why was I supposed to bring salad?”

Both of their heads turned to the bag of arugula that was patiently waiting on the kitchen counter.

“Oh yeah,” Snafu said. He took a breath, but before he could start a sentence, they heard the loud foot stomp Eugene had heard earlier coming from underneath the wooden box. 

In an instant, Snafu turned into the particular kind of loving mush people seemed to transform into whenever they saw a puppy or a cat.

“Oh, no, poor things. Bet y’all haven’t heard something as ugly as grown-ass men crying their eyes out before, huh? Some disturbing idiots we are, I know, I know.”

He carefully reached into the box with both hands and emerged with two disgruntled looking bunnies in each palm, one white and one brown. 

“Gene, meet Bazil,” he said, handing the white rabbit two a speechless Eugene, then lifting the other one to his face. “And this is Maelys. I think she ate my DIY-magazine, naughty girl.”

Maelys didn’t look very impressed, her tiny nose moving up and down quickly as she sniffed at Eugene’s hair, before starting to squirm in Snaf’s hold. 

“Ah, you saw the salad, didn’t you,” Snafu drawled, pressed a gentle kiss to her head and let her back down. She hopped onto the couch next to Eugene, curiously eyeing the hand he stretched out to pet her. With his other he scritched behind Bazil’s ears. 

“Never took you for a bunny person,” he murmured, giggling as Maelys decided to lick his fingers with her tiny, coarse tongue. “By God, they’re adorable.”

“Yeah,” Snafu sighed, making heart at Bazil, who was preoccupied with making heart eyes at the arugula. With a huff, Snafu took the salad out of the bag and washed it in the sink, heaping it onto a plate afterwards. 

At the sound of porcelain meeting wooden floor, both bunnies perked up and left Eugene’s caressing hands in favor of their dinner. 

Snafu sat down next Eugene, leaning into him when he wrapped his arm around his slender shoulders.

“They leave hair everywhere, but they are the cutest little fucks around here. And easy to take care off, too. If they get too lonely while I’m at work, they just take a walk to the neighbor’s kids.”

Eugene raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Don’t you close the door?”

“Of course I close and lock the fucking door,” Snafu snorted. “Doesn’t mean that they haven’t found a way out every single time if they wanted to. Can’t do anything against it except locking them in the bathroom, but that’d be mean for one and secondly I’m sure they would find a way to break out anyway. I’m sure it’s Maelys’ fault. She likes high places and risks more than a rabbit should.”

“Kind of reminds me of someone else, ‘cept for the risk-taking,” Eugene mused, knocking his shoulder against Snafu’s playfully.

Snafu smirked. “What, I ain’t a risk-taker? Where’d you gather that from? Do you know me?”

“Well, in important cases you definitely showed you possessed at least a tiny amount of common sense. In any case, aren’t you afraid that they’ll get – I don’t know – eaten, or run over or something?”

“Nah.” Snafu stretched out a bare foot to point out a piece of salad that Bazil had knocked off the plate in his haste. Maelys immediately pounced on it.

“They’re clever. She ran away from the butcher who was selling them. She’s a survivor. And Bazil would follow her everywhere. And there aren’t any dogs or cats ‘round here, except for some strays. Also, everyone here knows them, they’ve probably been in every house in this street so far, so they know who to bring them back to.”

Eugene guffawed. “Wow, you’ve gotten yourself a handful.”

“Two handfuls. Literally.”

Later, they shared Snafu’s twin bed, slung around each other in a tangle of limbs to not fall out. 

At some point of the night, Eugene gave a very unmanly scream as something warm and fluffy landed on his chest, and the poor bunny looked just as puzzled as him that there was something else in the bed other than Snafu. A second weight on his stomach told him that Bazil had followed, equally astonished about the new situation.

“Oh, sorry,” Snafu mumbled sleepily, “guess you’re gonna have to get used to that. Ain’t nothing that’s gonna stop them from sleeping in here. I tried everything.” (That was a lie. It had been a very beneficial arrangement.)

Eugene dared to set the curious animals into the little space between the pillow and the headboard, where they curled up ‘bunny-pillow style’, as Snafu called it, nose to nose, and closed their eyes halfway, satisfied and relaxed. 

As a content Snafu fell asleep to the sound of three different people breathing and being generally alive in his vicinity, Eugene listened to the street musicians outside and finally, after eternities of war and sixteen months of desolation, finally dared to have hope for a better, joint future.

**Author's Note:**

> Part 2 of my Bunny!Verse. Eugene is now part of the family and they may have to look for a new bed.  
> Maelys and Bazil are based on my own bunnies, and I promise you that they can break out of _everything_. Mine even opened doors. Nothing is safe from them. Great fun for all! :D  
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
